I had this horrible thing called campylobacter when I was in high school. Basically, it happens when intestinal bacteria infest your stomach. Some jerk didn't wash his/her hands after using the bathroom and took some chips from the communal bowl at my boarding school. I got some chips his/her hand had brushed up against. The next, I got all the symptoms of the worst stomach flu you've ever HEARD of, plus a 106.9 degree fever. They had to put me in an ice bath for two days. I was also hallucinating. To make a long story short (TOO LATE!)
, I was afraid I was gonna die, then I was sure I was dying, then I was afraid I WASN'T gonna die. I was sick for a full week. I then took my AP exams a few days later. I still wasn't 100% with it. I kept feeling like my head was floating on a balloon, and I kept hallucinating that my pencils were rolling away when they weren't. I also got dizzy a couple times.
I had always been immune to chicken pox. My parents had exposed me MULTIPLE times as a kid, but I never got it. Well, the problem with being immune to something is that if your immune system is being beaten half to death, you're not immune to it anymore. When I was sick in the bed in the infirmary, they figured I'd had chicken pox before, so when a kid came in to the infirmary with the pox, they quarantined him with me.
So, a couple weeks after I recovered from the campylobacter, I came down with adult onset chicken pox (I was 17 at the time). My left eye swelled shut (my dad told me I looked like I'd been hit by Mike Tyson). The worst was the crotch and the armpits, though, cause I got them on BOTH sides of each so they'd rub together. That was AGONY. I had to walk around like a bowlegged cowboy with my arms held over my head. Anyway, not fun.
Those were the worst two illness related stories of my life, and they happened within a month of each other. Having to get my tonsils out and my appendix and my pylonidal sinus operated on were nothing compared to that. Ripping up my knee (football) and tearing my rotator cuff (volleyball) was nothing, and getting a concussion (rugby) was a breeze. Getting Osgood Schlatter was pie. Getting turbinated was simple (my sinuses freaked out and they ODed me on antibiotics to try to get them down, but nothing worked, so they stuck two needle electrodes up my nostrils and shot a few thousand volts between them to burn the crap out of them. The scar tissue was supposed to force them to shrink... I had the worst nosebleeds for about a month, not to mention blowing out the scar tissue when it fell off was no picnic, like blowing sharp bogies the size of a quarter out of your nose, but it worked). Let me tell you, boys and girls, campylobacter followed immediately by adult onset chicken pox are NOTHING to sneeze at. I felt like I'd been probed by
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